


Trouble will find me

by oliwellwhocares



Category: No. 6 - All Media Types
Genre: But like it's fine, Future Fic, M/M, Reunion, Shion is sad, there's a child..., what the FUCK can i tag for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25015720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oliwellwhocares/pseuds/oliwellwhocares
Summary: Shion might as well be tearing petals off a flower. He's dead, he's alive. He's gone, he's back.
Relationships: Nezumi/Shion (No. 6)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 53





	Trouble will find me

**Author's Note:**

> the summary is so emo. this is not a sad story guys i swear i'm legally obligated to write happy endings for them. Title is an album by The National!

When Shion sees Nezumi again, after… _after,_ it’s in the bakery. Kanan had a lot to do, _after_ , and Shion did too, and everyone did, but the bakery was only closed for a few months. It had not always been perfect, when Shion had to stay in the old west block for almost two months, and when the importations had been such a mess that there wasn’t any flour to be found in the whole city, so yeah, there were times where Kanan was alone again and had nothing to offer apart from some company, but it was still open.

Shion started out working at the city reconstruction.

Well, everyone did, really. At the beginning, that’s what absolutely needed to be done, but soon enough, people started going back to their old activities, or trying out new ones. And while new theaters opened, and Inukashi was meeting with people who wanted to learn to take care of the animals that were barely starting to come back inside the walls, and Kanan went back to the bakery, Shion threw everything he had into the city. International relationships with the other cities who didn’t understand why anything had to change, and the petty inner arguments to decide who could really decide, and the struggle to actually decide anything, and just an absolute mess of politics overtook his life for three years. 

The night he spent crying in his mother’s arms, she begged him not to go back. 

He works at the bakery, now. It’s been almost five years, but he’s still far from being as good as his mother, and he still likes talking to people, so he manages the counter. They get a lot of circulation, way more than during the first years of uncertainty, and definitely more than during the No.6 days.

The city still doesn’t have a name. Every year, with the city council change, there’s a vote to name it, and every time, the process takes 6 months of propositions and voting for lists and ideas, until it settles on a name that no one’s really satisfied with, and it all starts again half a year later.

Everybody uses a different name. Some people give it the name of a parent, or a lover. He heard No.7, or No.6,5, and Inukashi still calls it Bastard Central. Kanan and Shion simply call it the city. 

“It’s a nice city,” says the guy who enters the bakery, and so Shion nods. 

“It’s our city.” 

He doesn’t seem to be from around here, with the way he says it, and the way Shion saw him look at the sign outside the door for a few minutes before coming in, taking in the street, like he was making sure he was in the right place. It happens, they have sort of a reputation, a little bit because of Shion’s eyes and scar and history, and a lot because of his mom’s baking skills. 

“That’s good,” the stranger says, sounding very serious about it. He’s looking right at Shion, but not his eyes. He’s looking at his hair. They’ve completely regrown, and he hasn’t had a hint of white in it for years, but people still expect that sometimes, particularly from other cities. 

He looks like Nezumi. He looked like Nezumi outside, messy and dirty clothes and managing to have an attitude while just standing there, and he looks like him now, dark hair pulled back, and cat eyes. A little younger than Nezumi would be, maybe. It’s hard to say.

“What can I do to help you?” 

It’s not the first time Shion thinks that someone looks like Nezumi. He’s had a lot of embarrassing situations, years ago, of calling out random people in the street. He knows better, now, and keeps going as usual. 

The stranger doesn’t answer at first, but he’s not looking at anything in the bakery. Just at Shion, kinda looking like he might ask for him instead of a pastry, actually. Shion wouldn’t mind, even though he usually tries to avoid getting close to those who make him think about Nezumi now. It seems unhealthy, but this one is really pretty.

Still, he’s technically in a professional setting.

“If there’s anything you want not available at the moment, you can go sit on the roof and we can get it ready in half an hour!” He tries to inject his usual enthusiasm in it, not letting himself be unnerved by the intensity of the guy’s stare.

“Do you have cherry pie?” he finally answers, and Shion has to force himself not to shiver. Weird coincidence, nothing more. 

“Yes! Do you want it to go, or to eat here?”

There’s a second of silence, during which Shion’s brain runs wild, trying to remember Nezumi’s voice, if it sounded like that when he said _cherry_. 

“To go, please.” Shion feels a guilty relief, that he won’t have to bear this much longer.

He has to leave the counter, brushing by the stranger to go cut the pie sitting by the window display. Now that he notices it, the dude smells like he hasn’t showered in a while, which sort of helps to tone down the attraction Shion is feeling, but unfortunately, not the uncanny resemblance.

“Is it your first time visiting the city?” he asks with his back still turned, trying to distract himself from the feeling of a stare on his nape.

“I was here a good while ago.”

Well, this means everything and nothing.

“It changes pretty fast, right?”

“It sure does.”

This is… better. It’s standart small talk with a client, a little awkward, and this is probably the first time he’s relieved to have an awkward discussion.

“Here!” He turns around to hand him the neatly wrapped piece, realising at this moment he hasn’t even asked how many slices he wants. _Shit,_ is this really bothering him this much?

“How much do I owe you,” asks the guy, apparently satisfied. 

“Oh! You really haven’t been here for a while,” Shion smiles, “however much you want, really!”

The guy’s eyes get so wide Shion has to hold back a dumb giggle.

“What?”

“We don’t depend on this for living. You can pay whatever you want, it’s fine anyway!”

If there’s one thing that doesn’t make him regret the years he spent killing himself working for the city, it’s certainly this. 

“Oh.” There’s a second of the stranger’s grey eyes finally looking around, seeming to take in the cakes on every surface, and the absence of price. “Well. I don’t have anything anyway.”

Shion can’t stop himself from laughing this time, and the guy looks back at him immediately, with this weird intensity that chokes the laughter in his throat.

Fuck, his eyes are really… Nice. _Like a storm cloud_ , his mind provides, and. He may not be sure of a lot of things, now, but he still remembers perfectly that this was the first thought he had, 12 years ago, when he saw eyes like those for the first time.

“Well!” He exclaims, too suddenly, and way too loudly. “Have a good day!”

He’s being extremely rude, he knows, thank you. But that’s too much. He has to go back behind the counter, and listen to the man saying “you too,” strangely softly, like he’s compensating Shion’s almost scream, and he has to _not_ watch him push the door and walk down the street, and through it all he has to repeat to himself, _Nezumi is dead, Nezumi is dead, Nezumi is dead. He’s. Dead._

* * *

The second time, he’s at the park, with Safu. She’s growing so much, and her latest decision has been to cut her hair as short as possible. They collectively talked her out of shaving it off completely, but it’s still very short, and she keeps touching it, rubbing her still chubby fingers on her head with a giant smile.

Shion forgot to make her wear something dark, and he winces when she rolls a little from side to side, and he sees the green stains on her peach dress. Well. It’s not the first time he’ll have to suffer through one of Inukashi’s lecture about taking care of their collective daughter, and it won’t be the last. 

“Shion!” she exclaims when she stands up. Shion has always been Shion, and Inukashi has always been Inu, and Kanan and Rikiga have always been Mom and Dad, which never fails to be hilarious. Safu stumbles a little on her way to him, standing back up immediately. She still stumbles a lot, everyone they’ve seen saying that she runs too much for a child whose legs have so many development issues.

It’s no use trying to get her to stop, though. So she runs, and by now they manage to find ways for her not to be in pain anymore, and she runs some more.

A voice gets to him before his daughter can.

“Shion.”

He knows the voice, that much is clear, but he doesn’t actually recognise it before turning around, and being faced with-

Not Nezumi. The guy from the bakery. 

It’s been a week, and Shion would really like to say he hasn’t been thinking about it, but he has. Forcing himself to remember all the details he can about Nezumi, everything to convince himself that it wasn’t him. Nezumi has bangs. Okay, yes, you can cut those. His jaw was more slender than that, he thinks, and his nose didn’t have the same shape. Maybe. And he was not that much taller than Shion.

It’s an absurd point to think about, sitting in the grass while the stranger is looming above him, but still.

“Hello.” At this point, he also has to remind himself that he is still a little bit famous, in a way. Also, Safu literally _just_ screamed his name for everyone to hear, probably in the whole city. It’s an easy name to know.

“Hi,” answers the stranger. And sits next to him. 

“Shion!” her voice is a lot closer now, and he barely has the time to look up before she throws herself in his lap. 

“Let’s play!” 

“What do you want to play?” Her face scrunches up, and then opens in a smile with a rapidity that always amazes him. 

“Hide and seak!” 

“Okay, do you want to find other people to play with us?”

She nods once, energetically, and doesn’t move from his legs, turning her head sharply.

“Do you want to play with us?” 

Fuck. The guy is still here. 

“Sure.” Well, shit. Shion can’t help but trust anyone who agrees to play with a random little girl. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Safu!”

From their spot, they can see the entrance of the park, which is why Shion sat down here, because he can see Inukashi walk in, arms brushing with Risa, the girl from the cat shelter they’ve been spending a suspicious amount of time with. 

He takes the time to wave at the both of them before steadying Safu trying to climb out of his lap, and when he looks back to the man, he only catches his face falling back into a neutral expression, with only the faint idea that there had a been a reaction to see before that.

“What about you,” manages Safu, standing up, clearly not about to wait for an answer before she launches herself towards Inu and Risa. 

“I’m Nezumi,” he calls after her.

Shion is standing before he realises it, or maybe he took some time to do it, since the stranger’s eyes are staring at him again. So grey, so much like a storm cloud, exactly the color of this day when the typhoon screamed and Shion tried to scream louder and Nezumi-

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, he can’t do this.

“Shion”, he says, and he’s not Nezumi, he’s not, this is some kind of sick joke, or a dream, yes, it’s probably that, a nightmare. It wouldn’t be the first of this kind, even though it hasn’t happened in a while. The stranger at the bakery upset him, and now… Now he’s dreaming.

“Shion,” nightmare-Nezumi says again, and he sounds farther away. No, that’s not it. Shion is walking away, he can feel his feet now, tripping in the dirt, one after the other.

Good. He needs to get away.

* * *

His mom is at the bakery, and it’s too far from the park anyway. Shion had considered for a second walking to his old house, in what used to be Chronos, with its fountain and big windows and the balcony and-

But it’s occupied, and too far away too, anyway. But he wasn’t far from the old West Block, that most people still call like that anyway, so. 

Here he is, sitting like an idiot next to the stairs leading to the shitty cave where he had his first kiss with a boy who’s dead now, who has to be, who's been gone for eight fucking years, and trying not to have a panic attack.

He swallowed his meds a good ten minutes ago, and his heart is slowing down, even though he’s not sure why. His brain certainly seems to still be running, especially fast now, to try to ignore the footsteps coming from behind him.

It feels like he recognises even his footsteps, now. That’s not possible, is it? A week ago, he wasn’t even sure what his voice sounded like anymore. And now,

“Shion,” like that, his brain says, Nezumi talked exactly like that, and he has to shake his head. Nezumi certainly never said his name so gently, with such concern, or maybe at the end, the day he died for the first time.

The steps are so close now, they pass by his left, and Shion can’t help but raise his head, and stare at him. Stare at the eyes already looking at him.

“I’m sorry,” the man says.

Did Nezumi ever apologise for anything?

“Is it you?” his own voice sounds less familiar than the man’s now. Weirdly weak.

“You don’t have to forgive me,” Shion’s brain is barely making out the words, focused on the voice, the accent, how deep it is, trying to imagining it reciting Hamlet, teasing him about his size. It works, and it shouldn’t work.

“Please,” he says, and stays silent, trying to remember how to form words that have meaning, pulling himself out of the endless pool of the details he remembers about Nezumi, all the things that don’t mean anything anymore. “Is it you?”

The face in front of him is terribly full of pain for a second, and Shion can’t help but think that that’s what he’d look like if someone shot him. In the leg, for example. Then it stops, schools itself back into neutrality, and that’s the face he must have made when Safu told him her name, then.

“It’s me. Shion.”

It’s only during the long seconds of silence afterwards, when Shion hears the both of them breathe together, that he realises how calm he is. His lungs and his heart are back to normal, and Nezumi is sitting in front of him. He looks and smells like he took a shower since a week ago, and he wonders where he did that. If he visited Inukashi, Rikiga, his old theater director. If anyone thought about telling him and didn’t. Then Nezumi’s lips lift at the corner, and it’s familiar, so so familiar, Shion is starting to believe that maybe he didn’t forget all those things after all, and he teases:

“Didn’t you recognise me?” and the calm is shattered.

Shion is screaming before he’s fully standing up.

“I thought you were dead, Nezumi!” 

Nezumi, Nezumi, he stands up too, and the smirk is gone and he can’t tell if that’s worse or not. 

“I recognised you, of course I recognised you and I had to convince myself that it couldn’t be you because I thought, I knew, I was sure you were dead and-” everything suddenly gets stuck in his throat, words piling on each other, glued together by anger, and incapable of getting out because Nezumi is touching him. 

He touches his arm, at first, and when Shion doesn’t react he slips both of his hands to Shion’s shoulders, and Shion is only thinking that he was probably expecting to get punched because that’s what they did back then, on this patch of land with a sun rising from behind a wall, but there’s no wall and the sun is already up in the sky and there’s flowers growing through the dirt, and Shion lets Nezumi hold him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I want to write a second part that would be all fluff but. We'll see. Should I make it Nezumi's pov..... he's so hard to write.... dramatic homosexual


End file.
